Love My Way: articles

Photo: Natalie Boog

Getting square

More used to playing characters on society's margins, actor Dan Wyllie has emerged as a leading man, writes Catherine Keenan.

Freaks and weirdos are Dan Wyllie's stock in trade, so it shouldn't be surprising when he pops out his front four teeth in the middle of the fancy restaurant. But it is. One minute he's explaining how he crashed his car at 18, leaving a scar that makes him look like he had a harelip. The next he's throwing back his head and snapping out his teeth like some comic-book monster.

"Has that got lettuce on it?" he says, grinning and flipping the plate and teeth back in. Thankfully not.

It's hard to believe, but only a moment earlier we were talking about how Wyllie suddenly seems to have become normal. Until now, he's made a living playing disturbed, disabled, or downright nasty characters, such as the murderous Eric Cooke in the television adaptation of Robert Drewe's The Shark Net, or the simple Fish Lamb in the hugely successful stage production of Tim Winton's Cloudstreet. "I've done a bit of serial killing. A bit of retarded work. Done a lot of hoodlums."

But now, in the Sydney Theatre Company's production of Brendan Cowell's Bed and in the highly acclaimed Fox television drama series, Love My Way, audiences are getting to see Wyllie play regular people. In Love My Way, he plays a thirtysomething father and ex-husband to Claudia Karvan, with no psychopathic tendencies, not even a gammy leg. And most critics agree he does it with great aplomb.

He is the first to admit that this change in direction is not really his doing. It was Karvan, co-producer on Love My Way, who fought to have Wyllie cast in the unfamiliar role of leading man. But he was ready for the change, having found that he was repeating himself playing one weirdo after another.

One thing about Wyllie is that he hates being bored. He is on his best behaviour when I meet him for lunch: polite, hesitantly articulate and slightly apprehensive. But just below the surface is a sense of the anarchic, of someone who likes pushing boundaries and doing the unexpected.

"I don't know anyone who is quite so willing to take a risk," says director Neil Armfield, who asked Wyllie to audition for The Alchemist in 1996, after seeing him in his first film, Spotswood. "He'd barely done any theatre at that stage. He took his teeth out and put funny glasses on and was doing a Jerry Lewis kind of thing. And it was terrible. Absolutely terrible. And I said, 'Let's just have another go and don't try to be funny. Put your teeth back in.' And he was sensational.

"He played the country cousin from New Zealand in fleur de lys flock tights and as a joke he put a little ladies hair roller into the front of his tights. And it gave the impression of a permanent very small erection. When he took it out, the character didn't work any more. It was like Harpo Marx without the hair." The roller stayed throughout the show's run.

Tights and hair rollers were not really the expected future when Wyllie, 34, was growing up on the North Shore, where acting was considered not so much a career as "a hobby before you became a lawyer". He was a "pretty hyper" kid, the kind who always had to climb to the highest point of any building, and was often in trouble at school, "just for being a smart arse and a clown. That's probably intrinsically linked with how I started acting, too. That kind of clowning."

He knew early on he wanted to be on stage, but his parents pushed him to get a degree so he followed many others from North Sydney Boys High and went off to study arts at the University of NSW. Institutions do not, however, suit him. "I tend to buck those a little bit and can't help but question people in authority."

He lasted two years. "I was one of those guys who was always at the bar, honing my pool skills."

He was more interested in the work he was doing with the Australian Theatre for Young People, though he still didn't consider it a potential career. Then a casting agent came through and he landed his first professional acting engagement alongside Anthony Hopkins and Toni Collette in Spotswood. "Having never really considered it a serious option at all. I got this film job. And got an agent. And just started working really."

He has been in some of the best Australian films since then: Romper Stomper, Muriel's Wedding, Chopper. He has also been there on the sidelines as these films have launched fellow actors Russell Crowe, Toni Collette and Eric Bana into the stratosphere.

"That's been an incredible motivation," he says. All actors dream of the big time, but fewer see it happen so closely and so often.

The nearest Wyllie has come to it himself is Cloudstreet, the epic five-hour play that drew hyperbolic reviews in Australia, toured to Britain, Ireland, Switzerland and the United States, and finally allowed Wyllie to give up dishwashing and bar work and get by on acting alone. Wyllie played Fish Lamb, the damaged and intellectually disabled heart of the play, and ended every performance in the first season, on Berth 9, by jumping into the harbour - often onto swarms of plate-sized jellyfish attracted by the lights.

"I landed on a dead seagull once. It was kind of like Chekhov."

Apart from a few classes, Wyllie has had no formal acting training and his risky, compelling and sometimes dangerous performances are a mixture of instinct and observation. For the part of Fish, for instance, he studied children with disabilities in kindergartens. "Once you start feeding your imagination, it just takes off."

Acting is, for him, an intensely personal business, intimately wrapped up with his understanding of himself and others. Fellow actor, writer and close friend Rob Carlton says he has never seen anyone work as hard as Wyllie on nailing his characters.

"He's not an intellectual actor. He's strongly and fervently anti-intellectual, and that's not to say he's not intelligent at all - he's massively intuitive. He's got this really, really solid bullshit detector. Constantly in rehearsals, he'll say 'that's not real. That would never happen. That's a writer's idea.' All those ideas you have in the writer's chair, it's really good to put them through the Wyllie colander."

He dislikes much about the Sydney acting scene and lives on the Central Coast, "a good place to be out of work". He surfs a lot and cooks fabulous meals and the cooking, Armfield says, is a key to his personality. Wyllie describes himself as a natural clown and exhibitionist and there is certainly that side to him. There is something about his elastic face that, even when he's being serious over lunch, makes you want to laugh out loud. But there is another side to him as well.

"There is a real person who enjoys controlling the situation," Armfield explains. "For someone who is so apparently laid-back and so easygoing, he actually loves things to be as good as they can be."